Los Angeles’ craft cocktail scene spills onto a wider stage

As New Orleans’ booming Tales of the Cocktail gathering shows, craft drinks are big business near and far. L.A. pioneers like Cedd Moses can drink to that.

Los Angeles bar designer Ricki Kline stands on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street at 3 a.m. holding a Sazerac in a plastic to-go cup while bartenders from across the country shout greetings, shake hands and swig from unlabeled bottles of boutique booze they barrel-aged themselves. It’s the spillover from Tales of the Cocktail, the world’s largest annual gathering of bartenders and liquor professionals, with more than 21,000 attendees eager to soak up trade secrets of the craft cocktail movement that has spread from New York and Los Angeles to unexpected towns in America’s heartland and beyond.

As carefully concocted, pre-Prohibition era-inspired drinks become big business on an international level, the apple martini is going the way of the VCR. Craft cocktails are now the hallmark of many fine dining programs, with as much attention being placed on the garnish in the glass as to what’s on the plate.

“Craft cocktails are everywhere now and they’re not going away,” Kline says. “It’s like the foodie revolution of the ’80s.”

A cab driver dropping off a Tales attendee has his own take on the scene: “Y’all have all sorts of alcoholic meetings, right?”

That would be one way to sum up the late-July event’s more than 50 educational seminars, free-flowing liquor tasting rooms, and alcohol-themed dinners, parties and sodden brunches that keep participants busy from the wee hours until they pass out — sometimes in their own hotel rooms, and sometimes not.

“I’ve never seen such a high-end event for such a bunch of lowlifes,” jokes Cedd Moses, who owns nine flourishing craft cocktail bars in downtown Los Angeles — including the Varnish, which last week won a spirited award at Tales for best American cocktail bar and was also nominated for world’s best cocktail bar.

“Entire bars shut down and send their people here,” says Tales founder Ann Tuennerman, who started the festival 10 years ago with just 50 people in the Carousel bar at the historic Hotel Monteleone. “Then they go back to their communities and spread more knowledge. We’re just happy they can all trace their bloodline back to us.”